Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Only 500,000 years left
William: Alan, and for the sake of argument let us suppose that we DO get where we are going and have a theory of everything, and we can literally redesign life or even create other planets. Then we have the burden of putting into action things which we may find morally abhorrent because of that irrational spiritual side. SUPPOSE we make advances and realize that we must methodically reduce the world population from 10 billion down to 1 billion and we must genetically redesign future generations and adopt a form of world or universal government which is much more autocratic than our traditional ideas, and furthermore suppose we prove that if we do not act then the future of culture is doomed. Will we have the guts to lay aside our superstitions about right and wrong and do the Nazi scientist thing for the sake of future generations. Would we have the courage to reinvent ourselves?
Alan : I have no ideas what is meant by "Inherently flawed." Does that mean he can't imagine it working? So, therefore it is impossible, because after all, no one else could be smarter, and so we are back to positing an invisible all knowing magic man? I had no idea that math was "self-referential." I am not a mathematician, so maybe I just never got to "self-referential math."
William: Like Wittgenstein, "what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence"... and Wittgenstein's fiery outburst with Russell saying "I dont EXPECT you to understand" and Godel's indefiniteness that there may always be truths than cannot be proven, and Heisenberg's uncertainty, and quantum doing away with strict causality and all that sort of thing. Alan you just seem to have some rosy picture of how logical scientific method is going to get better and better and better. Meanwhile, Earth has only about 500,000 years before our white dwarf sun expands enough to make it unlivable, which may seem like a long time, but we could be using that time to try to do something to make a future for human culture, and like Stephen Hawking says, the future is in space, so we should spend 100,000 years looking in ways to move the earth further out in orbit, and build arks piloted by cyborgs with all earths live and culture encoded genetically, waiting to find some new viable planet in some solar system, .... but all we are doing is pissing away our time with people who cut off their sister's nose and ears and live in the 7th century and worry about stepping into their place of worship with the right foot and not the left... while other people are concentrating on buying $50,000 watches ... so, sorry Alan if I see you as slightly naieve... a sort of Pollyanna... and suppose they figure out how to make wealthy republicans who can afford it live 200 years instead of 100 years, so Hugh Hefner gets to screw chicks when he is 200... and we cannot even find a way to meaningfully fill even 50 or 60 years of our lives and society has no use for us unless we are Mark Twain, or Michael Jackson, or Walter Kronkite or some similar persona....
